
Class. L 



Book 






/ 



*?1 



REVIEW 



JOHNSON'S CRITICISM 



ON 



MILTON'S ENGLISH PROSE. 



/ 



CHARLES WOOD, Printer, 
Foppin's Court, Fleet Street, London. 



A 

REVIEW 

OF 

JOHNSON'S CRITICISM 

ON 

THE STYLE 

OF 

MILTON'S ENGLISH PROSE; 

WITH 

STRICTURES ON THE INTRODUCTION OF LATIN IDIOMS 
INTO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



BY T. HOLT WHITE, ESQ. 



Ourif, tfitv Z&vrog xou im y$w\ $tgxo{j.evoto, 
2o* xo/Atj? iraga. vrivo) Gageixg %£~j5af lirofost, 
2TMIIANTGN AANAGN* OTA HN ATAMEMNONA EinH2, 
*Og vuv 7roXXov ctgitrrog iv< otdoltS) tvytrou ilvcu. 



PRINTED FOR R. HUNTER, 

SUCCESSOR TO MR. JOHNSON, 

N° 72, st. Paul's churchyard. 
1818. 



REVIEW, 

85c. 8$c. 



WE may, I think, attribute in a consi- 
derable degree the neglect into which 
Milton's Prose Works had fallen, to the 
vulgar obloquy inseparably attendant upon 
bold and open conduct on the unsuc- 
cessful side in civil dissensions. It re- 
quired the intervention of a century, before 
Dryderis incontestable merit as a Poet 
could buoy him up effectually under the 
public odium brought on his name by 
abetting the House of Stuart, with his wit 
and genius, in their attempts to subvert 
the Liberties and Religion of his Country. 
Whatever be their dissimilarity in many 
circumstances, the consequence of adverse 



fortune was to both in some measure the 
same. It is but recently that Dry den has 
had his high rank, as a Writer of Prose, 
acknowleged ; and no great number of 
years has passed away since the Earl of 
Orrery, in a publication, which had its 
season of reputation, told his Son, that he 
would find the " prosaical works of 
" Milton more nervous than elegant ; 
" more distinguished by the strength of 
H reason than by the rules of rhetoric : 
" his diction is harsh, his periods tedious ; 
u and, when he becomes a prose writer, 
11 the majesty that attends his poetry 
" vanishes, and is entirely lost : yet, with 
H all his faults, and exclusive of his cha- 
" racter as a poet, he must ever remain 
" the only learned author of that tasteless 
" age in which he flourished : and it is 
u probable, that his great attention to the 
" Latin language might have rendered 
" him less correct than he otherwise 
" would have been in his native tongue.' ' 
Justice to so great a writer as Mivton 
demands, that these summary and unde- 



- 

3 

signated strictures should no longer stand 
without some notice ; rather because not 
a few, for want of examination, have taken 
up the same ill impressions, than from any 
intrinsic weight which we should be in- 
clined to allow to the disapprobation of 
the Letter-writer on Swift. If it were 
said of the poet's blank verse, in the same 
vague and superficial way, that, through 
his endeavour to aggrandize it, in order 
to keep it from sinking into prose, he 
occasionally made it uncouth, and some- 
times embarrassed his meaning by strains 
of language, by disarrangements in the 
structure of the verse, and by involutions 
of the sense, or by other devices of arti- 
ficial contexture, entirely alien from the 
natural order and disposition of legitimate 
English — such remark, while it would 
not be altogether destitute of foundation, 
so far as it was referred to his great epic, 
must be received with very many limita- 
tions as to Paradise Regained; and would 
be especially misapplied to the sweetness 
and to the chastity of expression for whict 

b 2 



the Masque of Comus is conspicuous. His 
Prose partakes as little as his Poetry of 
any uniform and settled character. As 
in other skilful writers, we find the style 
suited respectively to his subjects. If 
there be sometimes fair ground for the 
observation, that " his diction is harsh" in 
his first and polemical treatises, which 
grew out of knotty texts in Scripture, and 
were on abstruse and disputable points of 
ecclesiastical history and government, his 
written Speech in defence of an open Press 
furnishes a perpetual and resistless testi- 
mony, that he could be as smooth and 
flowing as he is animated and copious. 
It abounds in passages where the life and 
vigour of the sentiment are happily ex- 
pressed in the unadulterated energies of 
his native tongue. Parts might be readily 
selected from it, to establish, that he often 
" drew from wells of English undefiTd." 
By this I would not be understood to deny, 
that a sprinkling of " extern words" may 
be pointed out; nor would I insinuate, that 
his phraseology in this, or in any other of 



his performances, is invariably exempt 
from solecisms of classical derivation : 
neither was to be expected in one who, 
like him, was habitually exercised in 
reading and writing Latin ; who through 
the whole of life was a diligent collector 
of materials for a Latin Dictionary, and 
who had been so sedulously instituted in 
all the literature of Athens and of Rome. 
In several of his works, however, parti- 
cularly in those of a later date, these 
blemishes are of no very frequent recur- 
rence. Few, if any, of his time will in 
these respects be found less exceptionable. 
It would be easy to bring abundant proof 
of Milton's powers as a writer of Eng- 
lish Prose. Here, to put the futility of 
Lord Orrery's deteriorating opinion out of 
question, I transcribe his panegyric on 
the Long Parliament ; since, in the Areo- 
pagitica, he himself refers to it with com- 
placency, and because a favourite subject 
would call forth much of his care in the 
composition. 

" Now, although it be a digression from 



' the ensuing matter, yet, because it shall 
' not be said I am apter to blame others 
6 than to make trial myself, and that I 
c may, after this harsh discord, touch upon 
' a smoother string, awhile to entertain 
6 myself and him that list with some more 
' pleasing fit, and not the less to testify 
' the gratitude which I owe to those pub- 
' lie benefactors of their country, for the 
' share I enjoy in the common peace and 
' good by their incessant labours, I shall 
6 be so troublesome to this declaimer, for 
6 once, as to show him what he might 
' have better said in their praise ; wherein 
' I must mention only some few things of 
' many; for more than that to a digression 
c may not be granted ; although cer- 
6 tainly their actions are worthy not thus 
c to be spoken of by the way; yet if here- 
c after it befall me to attempt something 
6 more answerable to their great merits, 
6 I perceive how hopeless it will be to 
' reach the height of their praises, at the 
c accomplishment of that expectation that 
6 waits upon their noble deeds, the un~ 



u finishing whereof already surpasses what 
" others before them have left enacted, 
" with their utmost performance, through 
" many ages. And to the end we may 
" be confident, that what they do pro- 
" ceeds neither from uncertain opinion 
" nor sudden counsels, but from mature 
u wisdom, deliberate virtue, and dear af- 
fection to the public good, I shall begin 
at that, which made them likeliest, in 
the eyes of good men, to effect those 
things for the recovery of decayed reli- 
" gion and the commonwealth, which they 
" who were best minded had long wished 
" for, but few, as the times then were 
" desperate, had the courage to hope for. 
i6 First, therefore, the most of them being 
" either of ancient and high nobility, or 
" at least of known and well reputed an- 
" cestry, which is a great advantage to- 
" wards virtue one way, but, in respect of 
" wealth, ease, and flattery, which accom- 
" panies a nice and tender education, is 
* as much a hindrance another way, the 
" good which lay before them they took^ 



8 

" in imitating the worthiest of their pro- 
" genitors ; and the evil which assaulted 
" their younger years, by the temptation 
" of riches, high birth, and that usual 
" bringing up, perhaps too favourable and 
" too remiss, through the strength of an 
" inbred goodness, and with the help of 
" divine grace, that had marked them out 
" for no mean purposes, they nobly over- 
u came. Yet had they a greater danger 
" to cope with ; for, being trained up in 
" the knowledge of learning, and sent to 
" those places which were intended to be 
" the seed-plots of piety and the liberal 
" arts, but were become the nurseries of 
" superstition and empty speculation, as 
" they were prosperous against those vices 
" which grow upon youth out of idleness 
" and superfluity, so were they happy in 
" working off the harms of their abused 
" studies and labours ; correcting, by the 
" clearness of their own judgment, the 
" errors of their misinstruction; and were, 
" as David was, wiser than their teachers. 
" And although their lot fell into such 



9 

' times, and to be bred in such places, 
f where, if they chanced to be taught any 
' thing good, or of their own accord had 
' learnt it, they might see that presently 
c untaught them by the custom and ill 
' example of their elders ; so far, in all 
' probability, was their youth from being 
' misled by the single power of example, 
c as their riper years were known to be 
' unmoved with the baits of preferment, 
' and undaunted for any discouragement 

* and terror, which appeared often to 
6 those that loved religion and their 

* native liberty; which two things God 
' hath inseparably knit together, and hath 
' disclosed to us, that they who seek to 
' corrupt our religion are the same that 
6 would enthrall our civil liberty. Thus, 
c in the midst of all disadvantages and 
6 disrespects (some also at last not with- 
' out imprisonment and open disgraces in 
' the cause of their country) having given 
' proof of themselves to be better made 
' and framed by nature to the love and 
' practice of virtue than others under the 



10 

" holiest precepts and best examples have 
" been headstrong and prone to vice, and 
" having, in all the trials of a firm in- 
" grafted honesty, not oftener buckled in 
" the conflict than given every opposition 
" the foil, this moreover was added by 
" favour from Heaven, as an ornament 
" and happiness to their virtue, that it 
" should be neither obscure in the opinion 
" of men, nor eclipsed for want of matter 
" equal to illustrate itself; God and man 
" consenting, in joint approbation, to 
" choose them out as worthiest above 
" others to be both the great reform- 
" ers of the church and the restorers 
" of the commonwealth. Nor did they 
" deceive that expectation, which, with the 
" eyes and desires of their country, was 
" fixt upon them ; for no sooner did the 
" force of so much united excellence meet 
" in one globe of brightness and efficacy, 
u but, encountering the dazzled resistance 
" of tyranny, they gave not over, though 
u their enemies were strong and subtle, 
" till they had laid her grovelling upon 



11 

" the fatal block ; with one stroke win- 
" ning again our lost liberties and char- 
" ters, which our forefathers, after so 
" many battles, could scarce maintain. 
" And meeting next, as I may so resem- 
" ble, with the second life of tyranny (for 
" she was grown an ambiguous monster, 
" and to be slain in two shapes), guarded 
" with superstition, which hath no small 
" power to captivate the minds of men, 
" otherwise most wise, they neither 
" were taken with her mitred hypocrisy, 
" nor terrified with the push of her 
" bestial horns ; but, breaking them im- 
" mediately, forced her to unbend the 
w pontifical brow and recoil ; which re- 
" pulse only, given to the prelates (that 
" we may imagine how happy their re- 
" moval would be), was the produce- 
" ment of such glorious effects and 
" consequences in the church, that, if 
" I should compare them with those ex- 
" ploits of highest fame in poems and 
" panegyrics of old, I am certain it would 
" but diminish and impair their worth, 



12 

" who are now my argument. For those 
" ancient worthies delivered men from 
" such tyrants as were content to enforce 
" only an outward obedience, letting the 
" mind be as free as it could ; but these 
" have freed us from a doctrine of ty- 
" ranny, that offered violence and corrup- 
" tion even to the inward persuasion. 
ft They set at liberty nations and cities of 
" men, good and bad mixed together ; but 
" these, opening the prisons and dungeons, 
" called out of darkness and bonds the 
" elect martyrs and witnesses of their 
" Redeemer. They restored the body to 
" ease and wealth ; but these the op- 
" pressed conscience to that freedom, 
" which is the chief prerogative of the 
" Gospell; taking off those cruel burdens 
" imposed not by necessity, as other tyrants 
" are wont for the safeguard of their 
" lives, but laid upon our necks* by the 

* " Laid upon our necks;" i. e. as a yoke: after the 
Latin, " Itaque posuistis in cervicibus nostris sempi- 
" temum dominum, quern dies et noctes timeremus." 
Cicero, De Natura Deorum, i, 54, 



13 

strange wilfulness and wantonness of a 
needless* and jolly persecutor called 
Indifference. Lastly, some of those 
ancient deliverers have had immortal 
praises for preserving their citizens 
from a famine of corn ; but these, by 
this only repulse of an unholy hierarchy, 
almost in a moment replenished with 
saving knowledge their country, nigh fa- 
mished for want of that which should 
feed their souls. All this being done 
while two armies in the field stood gaz- 
ing on ; the one in reverence of such 
nobleness quietly gave back and dis- 
lodged ; the other, spite of the unruli- 
ness and doubted fidelity in some regi- 
ments, was either persuaded or com- 
pelled to disband and retire home : with 
such a majesty had their wisdom begirt 
itself, that whereas others had levied 
war to subdue a nation that sought for 
peace, they, sitting here in peace, could 
so many miles extend the force of their 

* Is " weedless" an errour of the Press for £eed- 
lass? 



14 

" single words as to overawe the dissolute 
" stoutness of an armed power, secretly 
" stirred up, and almost hired against 
"them; and having by a solemn Pro- 
" testation vowed themselves and the 
" kingdom anew to God and his service, 
" and by a prudent foresight, above what 
" their fathers thought on, prevented the 
" dissolution and frustrating of their de- 
" signs by an untimely breaking up, not- 
<• withstanding all the treasonous plots 
" against them, all the rumours either of 
" rebellion or invasion, they have not been 
ci yet brought to change their constant 
" resolution, ever to think fearlessly of 
" their own safeties and hopefully of the 
" commonwealth; which hath gained 
" them such an admiration from all good 
" men, that now they hear it as their or- 
" dinary surname to be saluted the fathers 
" of their country, and sit as gods among 
" daily petitions and public thanks flowing 
" in upon them. Which doth so little yet 
" exalt them in their own thoughts, that 
<c with all gentle affability and courteous 



15 

" acceptance they both receive and return 
" that tribute of thanks which is rendered 
" them, testifying their zeal and desire to 
" spend themselves as it were piecemeal 
iC upon the grievances and wrongs of their 
" distressed nation ; insomuch that the 
" meanest artizans and labourers, at other 
" times also women, and often the younger 
tc sort of servants, assembling with their 
" complaints, and that sometimes in a less 
" humble guise than for petitioners, have 
" gone with confidence, that neither their 
" meanness would be rejected, nor their 
" simplicity contemned, nor yet their 
" urgency distasted either by the dignity, 
" wisdom, or moderation of that supreme 
" senate : nor did they depart unsatisfied. 
" And, indeed, if we consider the general 
" concourse of suppliants, the free and 
" ready admittance, the willing and 
" speedy redress in what is possible, it 
" will not seem much otherwise than as 
" if some divine commission from Heaven 
u were descended to take into hearing 
fc and commiseration the long remediless 



16 

" afflictions of this kingdom ; were it not 

" that none more than themselves labour 

" to remove and divert such thoughts} 

" lest men should place too much confi- 

" dence in their persons, still referring us 

" and our prayers to him that can grant 

" all, and appointing the monthly return 

" of public fasts and supplications. There- 

" fore, the more they seek to humble them- 

" selves, the more does God by manifest 

" signs and testimonies visibly honour 

" their proceedings, and sets them as the 

" mediators of this his covenant, which he 

*f offers us to renew. Wicked men daily 

" conspire their hurt, and it comes to 

iC nothing. Rebellion rages in our Irish 

" Province, but, with miraculous and loss- 

" less victories of few against many, is 

" daily discomfited and broken ; if we 

" neglect not this early pledge of God's 

" inclining towards us by the slackness of 

" our needful aids. And whereas at other 

u times we count it ample honour when 

" God vouchsafes to make man the in- 

" strument and subordinate worker of his 



17 

H gracious will, such acceptation have 
" their prayers found with him, that to 
" them he hath been pleased to make 
u himself the agent and immediate per- 
" former of their desires ; dissolving their 
" difficulties when they are thought in- 
" explicable, cutting out ways for them 
" where no passage could be seen ; as who 
" is there so regardless of Divine Provi- 
" dence, that from late occurrences will 
" not confess ? If, therefore, it be so high 
" a grace when men are preferred to be 
" but the inferior officers of good things 
" from God, what is it when God him- 
" self condescends and works with his 
" own hands to fulfil the requests of men ? 
" which I leave with them as the greatest 
" praise that can belong to human nature. 
■ ' Not that we should think they are at the 
" end of their glorious progress, but that 
" they will go on to follow his Almighty 
" leading, who seems to have thus cove- 
" nanted with them, that, if the will and 
" the endeavour shall be theirs, the per- 
" formance and the perfecting shall be 



18 

" his. Whence only it is that I have not 

" feared, though many wise men have 

" miscarried in praising great designs be- 

" fore the utmost event ; because I see 

" who is their assistant, who is their con- 

" federate, who hath engaged his omni- 

H. potent arm to support and crown with 

" success their faith, their fortitude, their 

"just and magnanimous actions, till he 

" hath brought to pass all that expected 

" good, which his servants trust is in his 

" thoughts to bring upon this land, in 

" the full and perfect reformation of his 

" church*. 

While sufficiently eloquent and luxu- 
riant through his Oration for the Liberty of 
unlicensed Printing, in the History of 
Britain, he carefully avoids all redun- 
dancy. There he is terse : perhaps not 
unfrequently too concise for elegance. 
The general cast of his periods is com- 
pact, and unquestionably the opposite of 
" tedious, " or expanded. It was Old- 

* From an Apology for Smectymnuus, 



19 

mixon's remark, when contrasting his 
style in that History with the amplifica- 
tion of Clarendon, that our Authour had 
not allowed words enough for his matter. 
Oldmiocon omitted to subjoin, on the other 
part, that this brevity of expression does 
not injure the perspicuity of the narration. 

To give every reader the opportunity of 
judging for himself, I will exhibit his por- 
trait of Alfred, traced with the pencil of 
a master, and delineated con amove; which, 
by the way, argues strongly, that he was 
no enemy to kingly rule, when adminis- 
tered so as to conduce to the People's 
welfare. " He was of person comelier 
" than all his brethren, of pleasing tongue 
" and graceful behaviour, ready wit and 
46 memory ; yet, through the fondness of 
" his parents towards him, had not been 
" taught to read till the twelfth year of 
" his age ; but the great desire of learn- 
" ing, which was in him, soon appeared, 
44 by his conning of Saxon poems day and 
?' night, which, with great attention, he 
44 heard by others repeated. He was, be- 

c 2 



20 

" side, excellent at hunting, and the new 
" art then of hawking ; but more exem- 
Xi plary in devotion, having collected into a 
" book certain prayers and psalms, which 
" he carried ever with him in his bosom, 
" to use on all occasions. He thirsted 
" after all liberal knowledge, and oft 
" complained, that in his youth he had 
" no teachers, in his middle age so little 
" vacancy from wars and the cares of his 
" kingdom ; yet leisure he found, some- 
" times, not only to learn much himself, 
" but to communicate thereof what he 
" could to his people, by translating books 
" out of Latin into English, Orosius, 
" Boethius, Beda's History, and others : 
" permitted none unlearned to bear office, 
" either in court or commonwealth. At 
" twenty years of age, not yet reigning, 
*' he took to wife Egelswitha, the daugh- 
" ter of Ethelred, a Mercian earl. The 
" extremities, which befel him in the sixth 
" of his reign, Neothan, abbot, told him 
" were justly come upon him for neglecting, 
in his younger days, the complaints of 



cc 



21 

" such as, injured and oppressed, repaired 

* to him, as then second person in the 
' kingdom, for redress ; which neglect, 
' were it such indeed, were yet excusable 
c in a youth, through jollity of mind, im- 
' willing perhaps to be detained long with 
6 sad and sorrowful narrations : but from 
6 the time of his undertaking regal charge 
c no man more patient in hearing causes, 
' more inquisitive in examining, more ex- 
' act in doing justice and providing good 
c laws, which are yet extant ; more severe 
c in punishing unjust judges or obstinate 
' offenders, thieves especially and robbers, 
' to the terror of whom in cross ways were 
6 hung, upon a high post, certain chains 

* of gold, as it were daring any one to 
6 take them thence; so that justice seemed 
c in his days not to flourish only but to 
' triumph. No man than he more frugal 
' of two precious things in man's life, his 
c time and his revenue ; no man wiser in 
' the disposal of both- His time, the day 
' and night, he distributed, by the burn- 

* ing of certain tapers, into three equal 



22 

" portions ; the one was for devotiop, the 
" other for public or private affairs, the 
" third for bodily refreshment : how each 
" hour past he was put in mind by one 
" who had that office. His whole annual 
" revenue, which his first care was should 
" be justly his own, he divided into two 
" equal parts : the first he employed to 
" secular uses, and subdivided those into 
i( three ; the first to pay his soldiers, 
" household servants, and guard, of which, 
" divided into three bands, one attended 
" monthly by turn : the second was to pay 
" his architects and workmen, whom he 
" had got together of several nations ; for 
" he was also an elegant builder, above 
" the custom and conceit of Englishmen 
" in those days : the third he ha-d in rea- 
" diness to relieve or honour strangers, 
" according to their worth, who came 
" from all parts to see him and to live 
" under him. The other equal part of his 
" yearly wealth he dedicated to religious 
iC uses, those of four sorts : the first to 
" relieve the poor ; the second to the 



i 23 

66 building and maintenance of two iiio- 
? nasteries ; the third of a school, where 
" he had persuaded the sons of many 
" noblemen to study sacred knowledge and 
" liberal arts, some say at Oxford ; the 
" fourth was for the relief of foreign 
" churches, as far as India to the shrine 
" of St. Thomas, sending thither Sigelm, 
te Bishop of Sherburn, who both returned 
" safe, and brought with him many rich 
" gems and spices ; gifts also and a letter 
" he received from the patriarch of Jeru- 
" salem ; sent many to Rome, and for 
" them received reliques. Thus far, and 
" much more, might be said of his noble 
" mind, which rendered him the mirror of 
" princes. His body was diseased in his 
" youth with a great soreness in the seige; 
" and that ceasing of itself, with another 
" inward pain, of unknown cause, which 
" held him by frequent fits to his dying 
" day, yet not disenabled to sustain those 
" many glorious labours of his life, both 
" in peace and war*." 

* The History of Britain, b. v. 



24 

Lord Orrery's critical dictation, that 
the Poet's " majesty vanishes and is en- 
" tirely lost when he became a Prose 
" Writer/' might well be controverted : 
but the short and plain answer to the 
noble Objector is, that he has placed on a 
parity cases that have no sameness of 
principle. There cannot be a fair com- 
parison between works, which are quite 
distinct in their end and aim. With equal 
propriety might he have urged against 
Shakspeare, that the sublimity of Macbeth 
is entirely lost in the Comedy of Twelfth 
Night. This remark is beside so loosely 
stated, that we are unable to fix the sense. 
By " majesty," did he mean grandeur of 
conception ? or did he mean stateliness of 
expression ? But we ought not to require 
either, in disputations concerning ecclesias- 
tical discipline, and the wearing or the not 
wearing of hoods atid copes, and linen vest- 
ments, or oilier sace iotal ornaments; and 
as little in Colasterion, or in a pamphlet of 
Considerations touching the hheliest Means 
to remove Hirelings out of the Church. No : 



25 

these and most of our Authour's controver- 
sial pieces were hastened to the Press, and 
treated on dark and intricate questions -*— 
questions, which refused ambitious orna- 
ment, and in which a regular pomp of 
phrase would have been ridiculously mis- 
placed. It was enough when they in- 
structed his readers ; he had no anxiety 
beyond. If he pressed his arguments 
home to their understandings, he defeated 
his antagonists, and accomplished all that 
he had in his intention. Still, at times, 
he breaks out in a touching strain of elo- 
quence, such as we might look to find in 
the prose writings of the Authour of 
Paradise Lost. 

Lord Orrery, indeed, allows his Prose, 
with no restriction, to be " nervous, and to 
" be distinguished by strength of reason." 
Surely this is the best, as it is the most 
decisive test of its merit ; and all that we 
ought to promise ourselves, on topics bar- 
ren as these were. This Nobleman's warm 
and merited recommendation of Sydney's 
Discourses concerning Government, both 



26 

for propriety of diction and for their his- 
torical matter, sets him above the sus- 
picion, that political bigotry dictated this 
ambages verborum, these " ragged notions 
" and babblements." He repeated, we 
may conclude, the undistinguishing cen- 
sures he had heard current, without exa- 
mination of their validity, and with as 
little reflection as when he asserts, that 
Milton was the only learned person of 
an age, eminent for Usher, Selden, and 
Cudworth, to name no more. 

The excuse of exemption from prejudice 
cannot, I state it with sorrow and reluc- 
tance, be pleaded in behalf of Dr. Johnson. 
Party spleen " put rancours in the vessel 
f 1 of his peace :" as often as the renown of 
a Nonconformist and Commonwealth's- 
man crossed his mind, it excited fervours 
of animosity not easily allayed. 

While writing his " new narrative" of 
Milton, he betrays an implacable bitter- 
ness against him, notwithstanding he was 
under the strong restraint of public opi- 
nion, as the late Mr. George Steevens 



27 

assured me : and the anecdote bears the 
appearance of much probability ; for when 
speaking his mind concealed under a mask 
he is explicit, that " Shakspeare's faults 
" were those of a great poet ; those of 
" Milton of a little pedant. When Shak- 
" speare is execrable he is so exquisitely 
" so, that he is inimitable in his blemishes 
" as in his beauties. The puns of Milton 
" betray a narroivness of education and % 
" degeneracy of habit/' Such was the 
direct hostility of his anonymous defama- 
tion, and it carries its own condemnation 
along with it. Again : " If we consider 
*' him as a prose writer, he has neither the 
"learning of a scholar nor the manners of 
" a gentleman : there is no force in his 
\\ reasoning, no elegance in his style, and 
" no taste in his composition* !" 

With sympathies far different, Sir Wil- 
liam Jones paid due homage to Milton's 
matchless endowments and exemplary mo- 

* Quoted by Archdeacon JBlackburne, in his caustic 
taunts and acute Remarks on the ZAfe of Mijlton, from 
a communication to the Literary Magazine by Johnson* 



28 

rals. In a panegyrical Oration, after the 
manner of Isocrates, which he composed^ 
for recitation before the assembled Univer- 
sity of Oxford, he exclaims — " What a 
" glorious character was Milton ! How 
* sublime a Poet ! How copious an Orator ! 
" How profound a Scholar ! The mise- 
" rable times in which he lived deprived 
*' this great man of the glory, which he 
" must have acquired, if his genius had 
" found room to expand itself in a free air 
" and a favourable climate ; for, had he 
" flourished in Athens, while Athens her- 
u self was independent, he would have 
" rivalled Sophocles in poetry, Demos- 
" thenes in eloquence, and even Socrates 
" in virtue*/' Not that we ought to 
arraign Johnson, because the affections of 

* Sir William Jones published this Oration in I7S2, 
appended to the second edition of his constitutional Tract, 
« An Inquiry into the legal Mode of suppressing Riots;" 
together with an excellent Speech he made, in 17^0, on 
the nomination of Candidates to represent the County of 
Middlesex. They were neither of them incorporated into 
his works. Why w r ere they omitted ? 



29 

his mind could not vibrate in unison with 
this high-toned eulogy on the strenuous 
vindicator of the Parliament ; yet we may 
w r ith justice reprobate the inveteracy with 
which he pursued him. An antipathy so 
marked, so virulent and unrelenting, and 
taking its rise from the causes I have as- 
signed, cannot but diminish our veneration 
for this great teacher of Morality. Alas ! 
it lies heavy on his memory, that his in- 
exorable enmity (it can be called nothing 
less) should leave it difficult to conjecture 
into what vehemence of angry reproach 
it might have hurried him had it not been 
bridled by his awe of the public. But 
though he had kept no measure, and had 
let this malevolent impulse run its course, 
who at this day would assent to the asser- 
tion, that he could have proved a censor of 
power sufficient to displace Milton from 
his elevated rank among the learned, the 
wise, and the good ? 

" Mark ! how the dread Pantheon stands 
6S Amid the dome! of modern hands ; 



30 

" Amid the toys of idle state, 

" How simply, how severely great ! 

" Then turn, and while each western clime 

" Presents her tuneful sons to Time, 

■ So mark thou Milton's name.'* 

In the mean time, without allowing his 
acrimony full scope, it never slept ; nor 
did he suffer any occasion to pass by un- 
heeded, when he thought he saw the op- 
portunity, either openly or by stealth, to 
traduce Milton's great qualities or to 
depress his name*. A premeditated, half- 
veiled design to vilify him is diffused 
throughout this biographical memoir ; the 

* In a conversation I once held with Professor Porson, 
on Dr. Johnson's participation in the accusation which 
Lauder preferred against Milton for plagiarisms from 
Latin Poets of the modern ages, he mentioned, that the 
subject had occupied his thoughts with a view to publi- 
cation 5 and added, that he only delayed it till he could 
procure a Pamphlet' which that controversy produced. 
Two of the arguments he stated were to my judgment 
conclusive on the question. 1. That, with a mind always 
eager for inquiry on every subject connected with litera- 
ture, as well as greedy of every pretence to depreciate 



31 

same in every event, whether it be in the 
scenes of domestic society and literary re- 
tirement, or in the career of his public 
occupations. To speak out, the Biogra- 
pher has dissected him with an invenomed 
scalpel. This infirmity of mind is exempli- 
fied in an instance that calls for a direct an- 
swer, where Johnson decides magisterially, 
that our Authour, both in prose and verse , 
formed his style on a perverse and pedantic 
principle : that he was desirous to use 
English words with a foreign idiom. By 

Milton, it is not credible that Johnson, as soon as ap- 
prized by Lauder of his alleged discovery, would not have 
expressed a desire to examine the works himself in which 
the original passages were asserted to exist. 2. That 
Johnson, throughout his biography of Milton, has pre- 
served a deep silence on the story of Lauder and his 
falsified quotations. Mr. Porson closed his remarks by 
saying, in his own emphatic way-—" Guilty-— •Death/* 

At the time, I understood him to be prepared for the 
Press, waiting only to read the Tract he mentioned ; but 
as I have been informed, that no such manuscript was at 
his death to be found among his papers, I now suppose, 
that he had been contented to retain the whole in his 
memory. 



32 

a foreign idiom the biographer means a 
Latin idiom ; his phrase when elsewhere 
inflicting the same animadversion on 
Milton. I am not quite satisfied, that I 
comprehend correctly what Johnson here 
intended by idiom. Did he accuse him of 
" Romanizing our tongue '■] too much, 
as Dry den accused Ben Jonson; " leaving 
" the words which he translated almost as 
" much Latin as he found them, wherein, 
" though he learnedly followed their lan- 
" guage, he did not enough comply with 
" the idiom of ours ?" Or was it, that, in 
the formation of his sentences, Milton 
still fixed his eye on a Roman model ? I 
am inclined to think, that he employed it 
in a sense different from that in this quota- 
tion from Dryden. He would, I believe, 
represent our Authour as giving systemati- 
cally a Latin signification to words radi- 
cally English ; or to words of foreign ex- 
traction, which time had legitimated so as 
to have acquired an acknowleged and ap- 
proved acceptation, become familiar by 



33 

general usage. Of this tendency I will 
subjoin some instances*. At the same 

* For example : hears ill, and of a sensible nostril^ 
phrases which occur in his Areopagitica, are of classic 
origin. To hear ill, Kockcxj^ axovziv; (Vide Steph. Thes, 
Grcec. in v. Akovuj.) to be spoken ill of, to be of bad 
fame. So Tacitus ; " Palam laudares : secreta male 
audiebant." Hist. i. 10. 

Ben Jonson raised a witticism on the equivoque which 
the introduction of this idiom afforded to our language : — 
" Sub. I do not hear well. 
" Fac. Not of this, I think it. 

The Alchymist ; Act i, Scene 1. 

Laud too used it ; "I conceive/' said he, " 'tis no 
" genteel part for a man of place and power in his coun- 
" try to oppress poor clergymen which neighbour about 
" him. In which kind this gentleman pessime audiebat, 
iC heard extremely ill." 

State Trials ; Har grave's Edit. vol. i, col. 874. 

Of a sensible nostril, 

" Minus aptus acutis 

" Naribus." Horat. Sat. I, iii. 29. 

Milton was not however tjie first who imported this 
aukward phraseology. His antagonist, Bishop Hall, has, 
" While now my rhymes relish of the ferule still, 
" Some nose-wise pedant saith." 

Satires; p. 58, edit. 1753. 
And in the same Oration Milton asks — « who shall 

D 



34 

time this predilection for Latin-English 
is susceptible of an explanation, which 
will prove the perverseness and pedantry 
here laid to his charge to be a flagrant 
exaggeration. It may be, that his eager- 
ness of detraction in every circumstance 
which bore relation to Milton instigated 
the sagacious Critic to this particular re- 
prehension against his better knowlege : 
otherwise, the view he took of this ques- 
tion was narrow and darkly clouded by 
prejudice and passion. He confounded 
antient practices with the opinions of the 

" be the rectors of our daily rioting ?" Where rectors 

is in the same Latin acceptation as in his verses in 

Quintum Novembris : 

"Cum niger umbrarum dominus, rector que silentum." 
But this sense in English was far from novel or peculiar 

to him. We find it in DanyeVs Sonnets, 4to. 1592. 

Signat, b. 2. 

" No bayes I seeke to deck my mourning brow, 
" O cleer eyde rector of the holie hill." 

06 well as in others of our earlier writers. 

These examples, and many more than these might be 
brought, will assist to screen Milton from this imputed 
singularity of intruding a Latin-English diction. 



35 

eighteenth century. To rectify his mis- 
take or his misrepresentation, it will be ne- 
cessary to throw a retrospective glance 
over the period in which Milton's birth 
was cast ; and as well to bear in mind 
how much of the. fashion of style and the 
ornaments of all languages are the work 
of chance or conventional. 

That a language, as it becomes more 
cultivated, should retrograde in any parti- 
cular of correctness, or should drop any 
refinement it possessed in ruder ages, 
would not be readily anticipated. Yet so 
fortuitous, so changeful are the operations 
of time and custom on human speech, so 
much is it in all particulars the creature 
of casualty, that this happened even to 
the Latin tongue. Cicero has recorded, 
" Quinetiam, quod jam subrusticum vide- 
" tur, olim autem politius, eorum ver- 
" borum, quorum eodem erant postremse 
" duse literee, quee sunt in optmnus, post; 
" remam literam detrahebant, nisi vocalis 
" insequabatur. Ita non erat offensio in? 
" versibus, quam nunc fugiunt poetse novi. 

p2 



36 

" Ita enim loquebamur, 

u Qui est omnibu' princeps : non, omnibus princeps, Et 

iC Vita ilia dignu' locoqile : non, dignus." 

Orator, s. 161. 

In like manner, the rustic dialect in 
the northern division of our island occa- 
sionally sinks the final consonant : 

" Wi* mair o' horrible and awfu', 

" Which ev'n to name wad be unlawful'." 

Burns's Tarn o' Shanter. 

Extravagant, metaphorical " Orienta- 
lities," driven, as we think, past the boun- 
daries of bombast and hyperbole into 
utter absurdity, captivate the glowing 
fancies of the Asiatics. " What (asks 
" Warburton) is purity, but the use of 
" such terms, with their multiplied com- 
" binations, as the interest, the com- 
" plexion, or the caprice of a writer or 
" speaker of authority hath preferred to its 
" equals ? What is elegance, but such a 
" turn of idiom as a fashionable fancy hath 
** brought into repute ? And what is sub- 
" limity, but the application of such 



37 



" images as arbitrary or casual con- 
" nexions, rather than their own native 
" grandeur, have dignified and ennobled ?" 
As there are modes of composition 
peculiar to different countries, so are 
there modes peculiar to different eeras in 
the same country ; and contemporaries 
often imbibe such peculiarities without 
thought, in the way we all receive but 
too many of our opinions, almost mecha- 
nically, like the air we breathe. Every au- 
thor' s style and manner, therefore, neces- 
sarily catches a part of its colour from the 
influence of situation. This happened to 
Milton like others ; perhaps insensibly to 
himself, unless to bespeak approbation he 
purposely conformed to the ideas of good 
writing then predominant, and to which 
few have run counter with impunity. But 
for these causes, would the dignity of his 
epic poem have been debased by the mise- 
rable conceits which have found a place 
there ? These corrupt " fetches of wit," 
where so much labour was thrown away 
in combining similarities of sound, or 



38 

associations of remote or unallied ima- 
gery, were the delight of the age ; and 
that they were the vice of the time, Addi- 
son held to be an extenuation sufficient for 
such manifest transgressions of the deco- 
rum, which in heroic, and in sacred poetry 
more especially, ought to be preserved in- 
violate. " Considering," says the Spec- 
tator, speaking of Paradise Lost, ** that 
" all the poets of the age in which he 
" writ were infected with this wrong way 
" of thinking, he is rather to be admired 
° that he did not give more into it, than 
" that he did sometimes comply with the 
" vicious taste which still prevails so 
" much." Not so Johnson : he viewed 
this practice with the eyes of the 
present age, and so measured one time 
by the standard of another. Making 
neither allowance for the effects of 
education, nor for the infection of ex- 
ample, nor for the ceaseless fluctua- 
tions in affairs of taste, he sternly de- 
crees, as if Mil,ton ought to be bound 
by the canons of criticism we have agreed 



39 

to acknowlege, but to which it is strange 
that he could hold a writer amenable, who 
had been in the grave for more than a 
century. We must believe, that this 
Dictator in the Republic of Letters either 
had himself forgotten, or that he hoped 
we should forget, the latitude left with 
the early writers of English. This la- 
titude in some degree extended to a 
lower period than that I am now con- 
sidering. Numberless violations of the 
precepts in the critical art, which the 
fastidious precision of to-day has been 
taught not to endure, were heretofore 
deemed pardonable license. The privilege 
of constraining, at pleasure, the ortho- 
graphy to their rhymes, which Spenser and 
Fairfax assumed, and to which sometimes 
Milton, and in a few instances Dry den y 
disdained not to resort, with Ste?mhold, 
Quarles, and other poetasters, did not and 
does not lessen their poetical reputation. 
The same resource would have reduced in 
our eyes Gray, or Cowper, or Lord Byron 
to a level with the sorriest versifier. Thus 



40 

to judge by modern opinions is an er- 
ror near akin to that of the French hy- 
percritics, who take exception to descrip- 
tions and expressions in Homer, which are 
repugnant to a higher order of civilization 
than that which the Father of Poetry is 
painting, and not according with the no-* 
tions of delicacy and politeness to which 
they are accustomed. Anomalies, like 
those for which our Authour is so harshly 
stigmatised, ought then to be regarded as 
belonging to his time to the full as much 
as the fables from heathen mythology with 
which he interlaced his Christian epic, or 
as the falling band in some of the portraits 
of him that have reached us. These re- 
flections will account for, while they ex- 
culpate his Anglo-Latian barbarisms, if I 
may use that phrase : but this misappre- 
hension (a very mild word) rises to im- 
portance in Johnson, who described him- 
self, and rightly described himself, as 
" having had more motives to consider 
" the whole extent of our language than 
" any other man, from its first forma- 



41 

lion* ;" and will therefore justify an inves- 
tigation somewhat deeper than I have 
hitherto gone, in order to lay open the 
reason that prompted our earlier Authours 
to depart from the prescriptive and ordi- 
nary forms of idiomatical English. 

When the vast migrations from the 
North overwhelmed Italy, and destroyed 
the Roman empire, the injury most to be 
lamented by distant generations was, I 
think, the extinction of the Roman lan- 
guage. I know not any ground for dis- 
believing, that adequate encouragement to 
the architect, to the statuary, and to the 
painter, would fail to produce abundant 
evidence, that we had little to lament 
from the Gothic rage, which (some say) 
fell on temples, statues, and pictures. 
The destruction of the Latin, as a living 
speech, is to be regarded in a light far 
different : that is a loss, which no human 
interference can retrieve. Its broken re- 
mains, as they subsist in Spain, in Italv, 

* In his circulated Proposals for editing Shakspeare. 



42 

and France, serve only to set off it's supe- 
riority over the present dialects of Europe, 
Our own, it is true, with the other Teu- 
tonic dialects, branches from a different 
stock ; but the whole are in the compa- 
rison as a tumultuary croud to a well- 
trained force, when once put into confu- 
sion all is lost. While we may invert the 
arrangement, or throw a sentence from a 
Roman Authour into the disorder of a 
routed troop, still every word will readily 
fall again into its allotted station. This 
syntactical discipline is combined, more- 
over, with a melody of numbers, which 
no less raises our admiration, that it 
should ever have arrived at such perfec- 
tion among a people, with whom wars for 
conquest were so exclusively the public 
care, that their epic Bard, when chaunt- 
ing the glories of the immortal City, 
proudly disclaims all national pre-emi- 
nence, other than to dictate the conditions 
of peace, and to excel in the arts of 
ruling over subjugated countries. He did 
discreetly : in poetry the Romans were, 



43 

for the better part, the echoes of their 
Grecian masters : only one of their Ora- 
tours has come down to us, and he sucked 
at Athens : and as to the fine arts, with 
the exception of architecture, they appear 
to have nearly abandoned them ; it might 
be in despair. 

Yet, after the long term of almost two 
thousand years, we are still gratified by 
the tuneable flow of Roman metre ; and 
we can ascertain by the ear, and without 
difficulty, the direct gradations of refine- 
ment in Latin poetry. The rough lines of 
Ennius fix at once his early date ; and the 
sonorous yet artless modulation of Lu- 
cretius is plainly distinguishable from Vir- 
gil's more dextrous construction and more 
mellifluent cadence. How unlike this to 
the verse of the various nations who now 
people Europe, which, it is most probable, 
is verse only to those with whom these 
metrical sounds are native. The recital 
of a French poem, it is observable, gives no 
pleasure to an English ear; and, unless 
the poetical accent of the northern and 



44 

congenerous tongues correspond, it is not 
unlikely, that the uninformed classes of 
the community would confess, that their 
untutored ears were incapable of catching 
any succession of harmonious sounds from 
the poetry of their neighbours : insomuch, 
that if any of these languages should cease 
to be spoken, their rhythm, and the musi- 
cal concord of their verse, might, in after- 
ages, be as irrecoverable as it is in the 
Hebrew Scriptures, the Commentators on 
which are not agreed, whether the whole 
were delivered to the Israelites in deter- 
minate numbers; or whether certain of 
their sacred books have metrical arrange- 
ment, a sort of prose cadencee ; or whether 
parts of them have not some settled 
scheme of versification, while the remain- 
der of the same compositions was written 
in plain prose. 

An apt conclusion is to be drawn from 
this digressive illustration of the large 
claims, which the Latin has on our admi- 
ration, both for the graces of its numbers 
and for its significant perspicuity ; the re- 



45 

suit of the unrivalled regularity of its in- 
flections, and consequent subjection to 
grammatical rules. This conclusion isj 
that, in the earnest attention which the 
antients obtained, when they were first 
drawn from their recesses, nothing could 
be more natural than that learned men 
should be eager to assimilate their un- 
formed, irregular, and imperfect language 
to that of Livy and Cicero, of Terence and 
Virgil. Every eye was then curiously 
intent on these monumental exemplars of 
true taste in composition, as well as of the 
extended compass of human intellect ; and 
while men of talent and erudition were 
occupied with the higher object of enlarg- 
ing and improving the popular conceptions 
and faculties, by multiplying transcripts 
and by expounding them, they would in- 
evitably grow emulous of the many excel- 
lencies in Greek and Roman literature, 
and affect correspondent appellations and 
formularies, as well as idioms and con- 
structions, that would give to their own 



46 

pages the impress of learning ; and while 
it adorned them would add to their cur- 
rency, and pass on the readers of those 
times as greatly contributing to the au- 
thority of their writings*. As might 
therefore be expected, the works alike of 
critics, oratours, poets, and philosophers, 
were, with rare exceptions, overrun for 
a length of years after the revival of an- 

* The most judicious of French critics has remarked 
of his countryman, Ronsard, a poet of the same date with 
the Earl of Surrey, Spenser, and Sir P. Sydney, " Ron- 
" sard avoit le genie eleve, et de grands talens pour la 
* Poesie : mais il semble que l'art n'ait servi qu'a corrom- 
•? pre en lui la nature, au lieu de la perfectionner. En 
" effet ses vers sont pleins de licenses outre'es, et Inflection 
" qu'il eut de les charger d'une erudition fatigante et 
" mal-manag^e, les a rendu peu intelligibles." Boileau; 
(Euvres, i, 54; Dresden, 17 67. 

See what the younger Racine has observed of Ronsard 
to the same purpose, and of the attempt in the sixteenth 
century of the French Poets to reconcile their versifica- 
tion to the dactylic measures of the Greeks and Romans ; 
Mem. de V Academie des Inscriptions ; torn, xv, p. 191, 
et 211 . Alberti is said to have vainly laboured to effect 
the same in Italian. 



tient learning, with unidiomatic and li- 
centious innovations taken from the Greek 
and Latin. 

These dead languages might have been 
made to enrich very successfully even 
u the comprehensive English energy" ce- 
lebrated by Lord Roscommon, if the en- 
deavour to increase our vocabulary had 
been repressed and regulated in its exer- 
cise by a cautious and temperate use. The 
misfortune was, that when the long-lost 
volumes of antiquity were again unrolled, 
this practice, with the usual fate of no- 
velties, was carried to an excess. This 
race of scholars seems to have supposed it 
not to be possible to overcharge their 
works with classical philology, " apishly 
" Romanizing, as if a learned grammati- 
" cal pen would cast no ink without 
" Latin." I avail myself of Milton's 
words, while I embrace a wider circuit of 
application. 

Not to insist, that Latin was for a long 
duration of time the common idiom of the 
European Literati ; it is said to have been 



48 

through his command of it, that Sir 
Thomas Move's fame was spread so widely 
over the continent. Bacon was well 
aware, that his reputation as a philosopher 
must be limited to this island, unless his 
work was cloathed in a Roman dress, 
which he accordingly felt a parent's soli- 
citude to provide for his production on 
the Advancement of Learning. And 
Milton, when vindicating to the world at 
large the execution of Charles, complains of 
the disadvantage that he lay under in ex- 
pressing- himself, from the necessity of 
employing a language not his own *. 

With the disposition then so generally 
prevalent, to fill our Teutonic diction with 
verbal innovations, and to infuse Latin 
modes of speech, it is somewhat remark- 
able, that Sir John Cheke, who was counted 
the learnedst of Englishmen, says Milton, 
should have inculcated other notions of 
such intrusions. Probably, he foresaw, 

* " In extranea prsesertim, qua utor necessario, lingua, 
. " et persjepe mihi ne^aaquam satisfacio." 

Def° Sec* 1 . 



49 

that, with the character, much of the sub- 
stance would be lost; and to stop the 
multiplication of these adulterations, as 
well as to restore the vernacular tongue to 
its just estimation, he set himself to a 
version of the Gospels, in which he la- 
boured to use exclusively words derived 
from the Saxon*. A Letter from him, 
preserved at the end of Hohy's Translation 
of Castigliones Courtier, which had been 
submitted in manuscript to Ckeke's cor- 
rection, I will give at length, as a literary 
curiosity. Beside his instructions relative 
to the properest style to follow in English 
composition, it exhibits an example of the 
reformed Orthography, which he recom- 
mended for adoption. 

" To HIS LOTTING FRIND MaYSTE.R 

" Thomas Hoby. 

" For your opinion of my gud 
" will vnto you as you wriit, you can not 
" be decerned : for submitting your do- 

* See his Life by Strype, p. 213. 
E 



50 

•'< inges to mi iudgement, I thanke you: 
" for taking this pain of your translation, 
" you worthilie deseru great thankes of all 
ft sortes. I haue taken sum pain at your 
" request cheflie in your preface, not in 
" the reading of it for that was pleasaunt 
" vnto me boath for the roundnes of your 
" saienges and welspeakinges of the saam, 
" but in changing certein wordes which 
" might verie well be let aloan, but that 
H I am verie curious in my freendes matr 
" ters, not to determijn, but to debaat 
" what is best. Whearin, I seek not the 
" bestues haplie bi truth, but bi mijn own 
" phansie, and shew of goodnes. 

" I am of this opinion that our own 
" tung shold be written cleane and pure, 
" vnmixt and vnmangeled with borowing 
iC of other tunges, wherin if we take not 
" heed bi tijm, euer borowing and neuer 
" payeng, she shall be fain to keep her 
" house as bankrupt. For then doth our 
" tung naturallie and praisablie vtter her 
" meaning, whan she bouroweth no con- 
" terfeitnes of other tunges to attire her 



51 

i self withall, but vseth plainlie her own, 
' with such shift, as nature, craft, expe- 
I riens, and folowing of other excellent * 
< doth lead her vnto, and if she want at 
6 ani tijm (as being vnperfight she must) 
6 yet let her borow with suche bashfulnes, 
c that it mai appeer, that if either the 
6 mould of our own tung could serue vs to 

* fascion a woord of our own, or if the 
' old denisoned wordes could content and 
6 ease this neede, we wold not boldly ven- 
' ture of vnknowen wordes. This I say 
' not for reproof of you, who haue scarslie 
i and necessarily vsed whear occasion 
6 serveth a strange word so, as it seemeth 
6 to grow out of the matter and not to be 
c sought for : but for mijn own defens, 

* who might be counted ouerstraight a 
' deemer of thinges, if I gaue not thys 
6 aecompt to you, mi freend and wijs, of 

* mi marring this your handiwork. But I 
f am called awai, I prai you pardon mi 
( shortnes, the rest of mi saienges should 

* Sic. 

E 2 



52 

"be but praise and exhortacion in this 
" your doinges, which at moar leisor I 
" shold do better. From my house in 
" Woodstreete 

"the 16. of July. 1557. 

u Yours assured 

" Joan Cheek." 

Notwithstanding the admonitions and 
example of one so critically skilled in all 
classical attainments as the Tutor to Ed- 
zuard VI, another admirer of our Anglo- 
Saxon Dialect, an Antiquary, who wrote 
at the commencement of the succeeding 
century, found himself nearly alone, when 
he protested against the influx of extra- 
neous terms and idioms still pouring in by 
the followers of the new phraseology : 

" Since the time of Chaucer, more Latin 
" and French hath beene mingled with 
" our tongue then left out of it, but of 
" late wee haue falne to such borrowing 
M of words from Latin, French, and other 
" Tongues, that it had bin beyond all stay 
" and limit, which albeit some of vs do 



53 

f like well, and think our Tongue thereby 
' much bettered, yet do strangers there- 
c fore carry the farre lesse opinion thereof, 

* some saying that it is of it selfe no lan- 

< guage at all, but the scum of many lan- 
' gtiages, others that it is most barren, 
i and that wee are daily faine to borrow 
6 words for it (as though it yet lacked 
i making) out of other languages to patch 
f it vp w T ithall, and that if wee were put 
f to repay our borrowed speech backe 
' agayne, to the languages that may lay 

* clayme vnto it ; wee should be left little 
' better then dumbe, or scarsly able to 
' speake any thing that should be sen- 

cible. 
For mine owne part, I hold them de- 
' ceiued that thinke our speech bettered 
c by the aboundance of our daily bor- 
6 rowed words, for they beeing of an 
' other nature and not originally belonging 

* to our language, do not neither can they 
' in our tongue, beare their naturall and 

< true deriuation ; and therefore as well 



(6 



54 

" may we fetch words from the Ethiopians, 
" or East or West Indians, and thrust them 
" into our Language, and baptize all by 
" the name of English, as those which wee 
" daily take from the Latin, or languages 
" thereon depending ; and here hence it 
" commeth (as by often experience is 
'f found) that some English men discours- 
" ing together, others being present, and 
" of our owne Nation, and that naturally 
"speak the English tongue, are not able 
" to vnderstand what the others say, not- 
" withstanding they call it English that 
" they speake*." 

But these heterogeneous admixtures 
have long become indissolubly blended 
with the original element of our Language, 
and have saturated it. 

Lucretius was fully sensible of the diffi- 
culties that he should have to encounter 
in disseminating the doctrines of the Epi- 
curean Philosophy, among the Romans, 

* See Verstegan's Restitution of decayed Intelli- 
gence ; p. 201. 4 to. 1628. 



55 

through the poverty of the Latin in his 
time * : our dictionary is so copious, 
that we need fear no loss of ideas from 
a paucity of words to give them a per- 
manency. Or if any accession be ever 
requisite, or expedient, it can only oc- 
cur in the departments of scientific re- 
search and physiological discovery. The 
jargon of the fanciful Paracelsus and his 
adherents, the mere coinage of their own 
brains, which for a while encumbered the 
study of the Hermetic art, is in no wise 
Superior to the cabalistic terms of the as- 
trological impostors; and any one, who 
compares it with the recent nomenclature 
of improved Chemistry, will feel himself to 
be justified in maintaining, that the Greek 
for this purpose may be still laid under 
contribution with advantage. 

* " Nee me animi fallit, Graiorum obscura reperta 
" Difficile inlustrare Latinis versibus esse ; 
" Multa novis verbis prsesertim quom sit agundum 
" Propter egestatem linguae, et rerum novitatera." 

1.36. Wakefield 1 s edit. 



56 

As a further palliation of Milton's 
Latinized improprieties of expression, it 
remains to be observed, that the English 
had not yet settled down into the con- 
sistency it afterward attained. Instead, 
therefore, of taxing him captiously, and 
without any intimation of what would 
absolve him from the imputation of per- 
verseness and pedantry, if the Biographer 
had entered on his task with an ingenuous 
bent of mind, he would have been led to a 
conclusion much less rigorous. For an 
authour of this period to be addicted to 
Latinism is not enough to entitle us to 
condemn him peremptorily as a pedant, 
when he was following, in common with 
his contemporaries, the example of his 
predecessors. How did this appear at the 
time it was written ? is therefore the pre- 
vious inquiry of every candid Critic, before 
he concludes that to be perverse or pe- 
dantic, which in the revolutions of literary 
taste becomes exploded. We may turn 
the edge of this reproof back on himself ; 



57 

for a more reasonable application of these 
epithets might be made to him, who, 
abandoning the practice of his day, deli- 
berately seeks to himself a name by the 
singularity of his manner. If, then, 
Johnson had taken into consideration the 
fashion of the times, hfi would have un- 
avoidably mollified this severity of judg- 
ment, and called us back to view an im- 
portant stage in the progress of the English 
tongue ; a stage, which it requires some 
exertion of our charity to believe, that he 
could pass without notice, who had com- 
piled its Grammar and written its History. 
During the age of Milton, and those 
immediately preceding, its flux state em- 
boldened many of our writers each to try 
his several project in moulding it afresh. 
For example, Sir Thomas Smith, whom 
Strype calls " a great refiner of the 
" English writing/' proposed to break up 
our Alphabet, and to cast a considerable 
proportion of its characters in a new 
shape, on several of which he bestowed 



58 

novel and complex powers. It was an- 
other part of his scheme to have doubled 
the Vowels, and to have augmented the 
Letters to twenty-nine ; out of which num- 
ber he would have taken nineteen from 
the Latin, four from the Greek, and have 
kept of the Saxon only the remaining six. 
Of so ductile a temper did he consider the 
texture of his native tongue, and so pliable 
as to be twisted after any new model, like 
clay in the hand of the potter*. 

While many exerted themselves to trans- 
fuse into the body of their prose the spirit 
which thev extracted from the remains of 
classic genius, others expended infinite 
pains in a more arduous undertaking, 
when they strove to supplant our modu- 
lated and rhyming Couplets by Dactyls 
and Spondees ; an attempt scarcely less 
discordant to the tone of the English lan- 
guage, than the change in the constituent 

* See his Tract, " De recta et emendata Linguae An- 
glicae Scriptione, Dialogus, Thoma Smitho Equestris 
Ordinis Anglo Authore, Lutetiae, 1568, 4W* 



59 

parts of its words, by the proposed mode 
of English orthography, which the States- 
man just mentioned amused his retired 
hours with sketching out. Spenser, to 
make the beauties of Latin Poetrv coin- 
pletely our own, meditated a poem in 
English Hexameters. Some English 
Iambics to the memory of Sir Philip Sid~ 
ney are attributed to his " Mourning 
Muse." i This flower of English chivalry 
himself interspersed verse in Roman feet 
over his heroic Pastoral : and in fete same 
reign Puftenkam dedie -yt^d a chapter of 
" The Arte of English Potiie/' to show, 
" How if all maner of sodaine innouations 
" were not very scandalous, specially in 
" the Lawes of any Langage or Arte, the 
" vse of the Greeke or Latine Feete might 
" be brought into our vulgar Poesie, and 
ff with good grace inough." Stanyhurst, 
accordingly, rendered a part of the iEneid 
into English, in the very numbers of the 
Poet of Mantua. But the Mincian Bay 
could not preserve its verdure on the 
banks of the Thames. 



60 

Neither was TVallis more successful 
with his English Sapphics : 

" Why' do the" h&he'n furiotisly rige ; and 
" Why' do the peeple meditate a v£in thing ? 

* Why' do the* kings that are on £arth unite 5 and 

" Princes assemble*." 

Milton's earliest essay to discard the 
" fair barbarity" of a chiming close, his 
literal version in unrhymed metre of 
Horace's Ode to Pyrrha, is another and a 
curious specimen of the attempt to natu- 
ralize, in this soil, a new variety of these 
exotic species of measure. So absolutely 
were our ancestors fascinated with the 
charm of classical quantities. This vene- 
ration, or almost superstitious regard for 
the relics of antiquity, would not leave 
their very defects uncopied. No Ballad- 
monger would now split a word to suit the 
exigence of his metre ; ending a line with 
the first, and beginning the next with 

* Wallis's motive for this travesty of the second Psalm 
vras, " ut appareat, quam facile ferat Latinos numeros 
" lingua Anglicana " See his Grammar, p. 198, Hollis's 
edition. 



m 

the last syllable. Ben Jonson used this 
license, and would have vouched prece- 
dents fetched from Greece and Rome, 
as a sufficient justification of this violent 
trespass against the established laws of 
the accentual combinations in our native 
versification. Nothing but this passionate 
fondness could have made them overlook 
the impracticability of substituting quan- 
tity for accent with success. 

" In this northern tract our hoarser throats 
, " Utter unripe and ill-constraiued notes. 1 * 

The attempt could not but miscarry in 
our tongue, whose strongest characteristic 
is its abundance of monosyllables. This 
obstacle could not, I apprehend, have 
been surmounted, if no other impediment 
had occurred to the adaptation of Roman 
Prosody to a Gothic frame of speech. It 
was the frequency of these and of similar 
experiments, which must have induced 
Lilly's complaint, in the Epistle Dedica- 
tory to his fantastic Romance, so much in 



62 

vogue at the court of Elizabeth : " It is 
" a world to see, how Englishmen desire 
" to hear finer speech than their Ian- 
" guage will allow*/' This is highly ex- 
pressive of the desire among our fore- 
fathers to innovate on their mother tongue. 
At the same time it is a confession, which 
surprizes us should come from so affected 
an Authour as himself. Or did his better 
judgment suggest this as an apology for 
sacrificing to a false taste, and surrender- 
ing his own sense of propriety to the pre- 
vailing humour of forcing the stubborn 
genius of his native language to adventi- 
tious and corrupt refinements ? Temporis 
ejus aurihus accomodatum. In a word, we 
do not appear to have gained any thing like 
stability till after the Restoration. Waller 
has a pleasing copy of verses to deplore his 
own hard fortune, and that of his poetical 
brethren, because their works could not last 
long in a tongue that was daily changing. 

* Euphues, or the Anatomie of Wit. 



63 

From the above notices, cursory as they 
are, we may safely infer, that Johnsons 
censure, to have made it just, should have 
been accompanied with some enumeration 
of the alleviating circumstances, which 
would exonerate Milton from this impu- 
tation of perverseness or of pedantry , in 
the obnoxious meaning in which it might, 
J grant, be truly applied to any one, who 
should now write the same : but till these 
circumstances had ceased to operate, this 
practice ought to have incurred a smaller 
share of reprehension. 

To pursue these vindicatory strictures 
yet a little further. Milton's deflecting 
English words away from their original 
or accepted sense to a Latin construc- 
tion, deserves neither praise nor imitation. 
Still it may be contended, that this practice 
is not more at variance with the analo- 
gies of the Anglo-Saxon than a style, like 
our Critic's^ inflated by Latin synonymes 
for words which are the proper growth 
of our own country, and Latinized trans- 
positions or dislocations of the natural 



64 

structure, with other unidiomatical ar- 
rangements. In the adjustment of his 
own sentences he was stiff and elaborate, 
as well as the leader in reviving among us 
the fashion of working Roman phraseology 
into an English ground. For where is 
the page through his numerous writings, 
which does not present developments pro- 
minently indicating propensities to " re- 
" pudiate his vernacular idiom*?" Where- 
as it might be fairly argued, that Milton* 
by giving a Latin sense to English words, 
has denoted rather a reluctance to deviate 
from English affinities than any desire to 
lay them aside. Then why, except with 
the design of depreciation, was it held out 
as more vicious to incorporate " foreign 
" idioms" with our native forms of speech, 
than it is to supersede Teutonic etymolo- 
gies by substitutes draAvii! from foreign 
radicals? Bat thus it is : .the vices of a 
past age astonish us ; familiarized to the 
vices of om o>vi), they excite little surprize. 

* Beidley on Phalaris. 



65 

Meanwhile, for fear that I should, 
when unfolding the motive of our Au- 
thour, and the excuse for his encroach- 
ing, like others of that day, on our An- 
glicisms, be ranged among those who 
mistake such depravations for improve- 
ments, I digress to declare, that the glit- 
tering fragments, which we for centuries 
have applied ourselves with unremitting 
industry to import from Rome to stud 
our Saxon fabric, give it, to my view, a 
tesselated, or rather a party-coloured and 
grotesque, appearance. We have wrought 
up a superstructure, which calls to re- 
membrance what travellers relate of some 
of the humbler habitations in modern 
Greece : they are, we are told, raised 
with the first rude materials that offered 
themselves, and here and there some ex- 
quisite remains of Grecian architecture, 
negligently intermixed by the builder, in 
mockery, as it were, of the original style 
of the edifice. 

Let it also be remembered, that, in the 
course of what many have persuaded 

f 



66 

themselves to believe the amelioration of 
our language, we have dropped not a few 
of those useful and ornamental distinctions 
of speech, which our Saxon ancestors 
brought over with them. In a happy fa- 
cility for compounded words their tongue 
vied with the Greek. A sufficient number 
of them are polysyllabic and well-vow* 
elled*; too many of ours are clusters of 
Consonants, curtailed of their fair propor- 
tion, or abbreviated to one syllable. 
Nearly all of their masculine and femi- 
nine Substantives, so conducive to perspe- 
cuity, have, with the lapse of centuries, fal- 
len into disuse f. We have continued only 

* To exemplify this, I will extract a passage from 
a metrical Calendar, printed by Hickes ; where we also 
catch a glimmering of Poetry. 

Spylce ymb pyprt pucan. Daenne pangar hpa&e, 

Butan anpe nibs. Blortmnm blopaS. 

©get te ylbum bpin^S. Spylce bkr ajritfS. 

Sisel beophte bajar. Eeonb mibban geapb, 

8umop vo tune. OOamgpa haba 

J7eapme jepybepu. Epicepa cynna. 
Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium Thesaurus ; I. 205. 

t As Fpeonb (Freond) Arnicas, a Friend J Fpeunbyn* 



67 

one of the variations of Case in the de- 
clension of the Nouns substantive. No 
distinction of Gender, Case, or Number in 
the termination of their Adjectives has de- 
scended to us. The Editor of Fortescue's 
Treatise on the Difference between an 
absolute and limited Monarchy, justly re- 
grets, that we have laid aside too many 
of the Saxon Comparatives and Superla- 
tives, by using more and most in modern 
English*: and for their Verbs, time has 
swept away the discriminations of the 
plural Number ; while we have poorly sup- 
plied the place of their Moods f; and the 

(Freundyne), Arnica; (Lye's Saxon Diet, by Man- 
ning in v.) ; which latter word our forefathers were con- 
tented to express by a She- Friend; and we have softened 
into a female Friend. So, at an earlier period Kunmjmna. 
signified Queen, and was deduced from Kunmg, King, 

* p. 19, 8vo. 1724. A book not unknown to the late 
Mv.Horne Tooke, as is evident by some of the Saxon 
Etymologies in his Diversions of Purley, borrowed from 
the first Lord Fortescue's glossarial annotations on this 
work of his venerable Ancestor. 

f " Longe melius vet. Anglo- Saxones prseteritum pass". 
" participium per ge, vet. Angli per y vel i, augmento 

F 2 



68 

inflections of our Verbs are become woe- 
fully irregular. For the loss of all these 
distinguishing properties, the introduction 
of a countless multitude of Latin words 
makes but a sorry recompense. They 
would be a sorry recompense, even if the 
larger number had not been previously 
barbarized by the French ; some of them 
no less preposterously than the names of 
our Circumnavigators were disguised by 
the islanders of O'Taheite, when they 
distorted Banks into Opane, and Cook 
into Toote. But of this enough. 

The impression of Dr. Johnson's wis- 
dom and integrity has, not without good 
reason, sunk deep into the public mind ; 
while his Critical Biography bids fair to 
rival in permanency the popularity of 
Addison's daily Essays ; I will, therefore, 
bring still closer to him the proof of his 

" more Grsecorum addito, formaruntj quod nos rejecimus; 
c * sic melius infinitiva sua Anglo-Saxones, per term, aw, 
" quam nos hodie aequivoco illo articulo to prsemisso ssepe 
w etiam omisso, distinxerunt," &c. Skinner ; Canone* 
EtymologicL 



69 

determined leaning against Milton. His 
carping and calumniating criticisms pro- 
voke the retort; and it is much to the 
purpose, because it supplies an undeniable 
confirmation of the unworthy and incur- 
able prepossession which rankled in his 
breast. For surely he himself too com- 
monly oppressed his sentences with gi- 
gantic, ponderous words, and not seldom 
overlaid his sense by " aggravating his 
style " with sesquipedalian Latinism ; 
where the Reader's attention is too much 
called to the consideration of the language 
in which the sentiments are conveyed. 
In his own scheme of sentence and me- 
thod of period he is far more artificial 
than the Writer whom he reprehends as 
perversely pedantic; insomuch, that he has 
undeniably become monotonous and a man- 
nerist. Without a doubt, neither of theni 
can boast the golden mean of Addison 
and Goldsmith ; but in the general turn 
and inclination of his diction, we are more 
to seek for genuine Anglicisms, and the 
radical constitutions and customary forms 



70 

of our H idiotic" phraseology. He la- 
mentably impeached his own consistency 
in decrying Milton's Latinized words, 
after the verbal sophistications, the stu- 
died deformities, of Sir Thomas Brown 
had met in him with an Apologist, if we 
may not call him an Imitator. That inge- 
nious Scholar seems to have been misled 
into the egregious errour, that in every step 
he receded from his mother-tongue the 
nearer he approached to elegancy and ex- 
cellence*. Now the Critic pronounces his 
style to be " a tissue of many languages, 
€( a mixture of heterogeneous words 
" brought together from distant regions, 

* In the address to the Reader, prefixed to his " Pseu- 
" doxia Epidemica ; or, Enquiries into very many received 
" Tenents, and commonly presumed Truths," Brown ob- 
serves — " I confess the quality of the subject will some- 
" times carry us into expressions beyond meer English 
" apprehensions. And indeed, if elegancy still pro- 
" ceedeth, and English pens maintain that stream, we 
ec have of late observed to flow from many, we shall 
" within few years be fain to learn Latine to understand 
" English, and a work will prove of equal facility in 
« either." 



n 



46 with terms originally appropriated to one 
" art, and drawn by violence into the ser- 
" vice of another. He must, however, 
" be confessed to have augmented our 
" philosophical diction; and, in defence 
" of his uncommon words and expressions, 
% we must consider, that he had uncom- 
" mon sentiments, and was not content to 
" express in many words that idea for 
" which any language could supply a 
66 single term. But his innovations are 
" sometimes pleasing, and his temerities 
f f happy : he has many verba ardentia % 
u forcible expressions, which he would 
" never have found but by venturing to 
" the utmost verge of propriety; and 
" flights, which would never have been 
i( reached but by one who had very little 
" fear of the shame of falling.'' The 
greater part of the merit in this antithesis 
of blame and commendation, it was a 
debt due to Truth and to Milton, at 
the very least, to have allowed him like- 
wise; since his defects, both for number 
and account, are of much smaller note thaji 



72 

Brown's; of whose pedantries what more 
ought to be said than that " he had been 
" at a feast of languages, and stolen the 
" scraps ?" Our Authour's tenour of ex- 
pression is superiour beyond all competition. 
His Prose Works are a rich fund of ele- 
vated phraseology : while, with a modifi- 
cation of his sentences infinitely diver- 
sified, he uses words with a philolo- 
gical strictness of signification, which 
the Lexicographer himself has not sur- 
passed. 

He never entered into controversy as if 
he was playing for a prize of oratorical 
disputation. In consequence, the Reader 
has not anywhere to complain, that he is 
cold, or jejune, or languid. The same acer 
spiritus ac vis pervades and inspires the vo- 
luminous body of his works. There is a so- 
lidity of Reasoning, a force of Eloquence, 
and an originality of Sentiment, that pe- 
culiarly marks them for his own ; not un- 
frequently accompanied with a plenitude 
and glow of thought, impressed by an in- 
tellectual energy highly characteristic of 



73 

an honest confidence in powerful talents 

and transcendent acquirements, exerted, 

as was his assured belief, in promoting the 

dearest interests of his country ; exerted, 

too, we should ever have in remembrance, 

without reward, and at the expense of 

eye -sight*, 

* Here I cannot forbear the gratification of tran- 
scribing the solemn and affecting adjuration forced from 
him by the inhuman reproaches of his enemies, on the 
sorest calamity that can afflict the human frame. " Ad 
"me quod attinet, te tester, Dkus, mentis intima?, cogita- 
" 'tiontimque omnium indagator, me nullius rei (quan- 
** quam hoc apud me saepius, et quam maxime potui, seri5 
" quaesivi et recessus vita? omnes excussi) nuilius vel 
lc recens vel olim commissi, mihimet conscium esse, cujus 
<c atrocitas hanc mihi prse cseteris calamitatem creare, aut 
" accersisse merito potuerit. Quod etiam uilo tempore 
* scripsi (quoniam hoc nunc me luere quasi piacuium 
<c regii existimant atque adeo triumphant) tester itidern 
" Deum, me nihil istiusmodi scripsisse, quod non rectum 
" et verum, Deoque gratum esse, et persuaserim turn 
"mihi, et etiamnum persuasus sim; idque nulla ambi- 
" tione, lucro, aut gloria ductus ; sed officii, sed honesti, 
"sed pietatis in patriam ratione sola; nee Reipublicae 
" tantum, sed Ecclesiee quoque liberandse causa potissi- 
46 mum fecisse :" &c. &c. 

Defensio Secundapro Populo Anglicano. 
And he afterward avers, « Hanc intra privates pari- 



74 

His Prose Works, it is true, are too fre- 
quently debased by unseemly, though re- 
criminatory, asperities on his opponents, 
in the manner of the age ; and not less 
acrimonious and vituperative than the vehe- 
ment effusions which Mr. Burke's terrified 
fancy, in his declining years, fulminated, 
without the extenuation of personal pro- 
vocation, on those who dissented from the 
political creed he then embraced; but 
these recriminations and asperities, now 
the passions that generated them have 
abated, every one would be pleased to see 
obliterated. And his pages, I deny not, 

" etes meam operam nunc Ecclesiae. nunc Reipublicae 
" gratis dedi; mihi vicissirn vel hsec vel ilia prfeter in- 
46 columitatem nihil ; bonam certe conscientiam, bonam 
46 apud bonos existimationem, et honestam hanc dicendi 
44 libertatem facta ipsa reddidere : Commoda alii, alii 
44 honores gratis ad se trahebant : Me nemo ambientera, 
44 nemo per amicos quicquam petentem, curiae foribus 
44 affixum petitorio vultu, aut minorum conventuum ves- 
** tibulis hasrentem nemo me unquam vidit. Domi fere 
" me continebam, meis ipse facultatjbus, tametsi hoc 
" civili tumultu magna ex parte ssepe detentis, et cen- 
" sum fere iniquius mihi impositum, et vitam utcunque 
44 frugi tolerabam." 



75 

are, again like Burke's, occasionally disfi- 
gured by coarse Metaphors ; such as would 
be hazarded but by few writers in the last 
or present century. At the same time, 
the urbanity of the Areopagitica proves 
how evenly he could guide his pen in ar- 
gument, when he was not goaded by con- 
tumelious reproaches and slanderous in- 
vective, on himself and on the cause he had 
espoused. He, indeed, must have imbibed 
a very large share of Johnson's political bi- 
gotry, who would refuse to acknowlege, that 
in his Prose, Milton has often embodied 
the creations of his mind in language not 
at all inferiour to his reach of thought ; or 
who will not confess, that these writings 
abound with vivid and striking imagery, 
and sometimes with figures bold almost to 
extravagance. When Sir 'Thomas Brown 
is said to have soared to an adventrous 
height, we may without hesitation reply — 
Milton's imagination towers an eagle's 
pitch above him. But it could only have 
been through a strange and unexampled 
fatality, had the Prose of the great Master 



76 

of unfettered Song been found deficient 
in the gorgeous trappings and embellish- 
ments, which Genius, cultivated and inven- 
tive Genius like his, must always have at 
command. Mr. IVarton, with his open 
aversion to the political writings, in an 
unguarded moment, admitted, that " what 
" was Enthusiasm in most of the puritani- 
" cal writers was Poetry in Milton. 5 ' 
It has been observed of a Hero of An- 
tiquity, that his imperfections flowed 
from the contagion of the times ; his vir- 
tues were his own, the spontaneous growth 
of Nature, or the product of Reflection : 
and the same observation would hold emi- 
nently true of Milton, whether we were 
to apply it to the matter or to the manner 
of his Prose Writings in English. 

Hitherto these remarks have been chiefly 
restricted to one imputed defect in Mil- 
ton's English Prose ; and now to wind up 
the whole on a broader ground. Its pre- 
vailing, perhaps its greatest fault, is pro- 
lixity of sentence ; sometimes accompa- 
nied with a complication of structure, 



77 

which perplexes the meaning too much for 
the Reader to disentangle it with ease to 
himself as he passes on. But this evolu- 
tion or elongation of period was by many 
then deemed a beauty. He derided an 
adversary for making " sentences by the 
" statute, as if all above three inches were 
" confiscate," and " who, instead of well- 
" sized periods, greets him with a quan- 
" tity of thumb -ring posies:" as Cowley 
called Seneca short- lung 'd, in ridicule of 
his abrupt and concise system of diction. 
If the dilated sentence, which stands the 
second in our Authour's Treatise ofRefor- 
mation in England, had attracted censure, 
he would have satisfied himself by appeal- 
ing to some of Tully's " periods of a mile." 
And who shall condemn the periodical 
style, as it has been denominated by a 
philosophical Critic*? Not they, certainly, 
who approve the volume, or rather pro- 
traction of sentence in Clarendon, where 
the sense is carried on through a length- 

* Harris. 



78 

ened contexture of clauses, a labyrinth of 
words ; so that his History not very sel- 
dom exhibits the unskilful mechanism of 
parenthesis included within parenthesis. 
All his wire-drawn amplifications, all such 
concatenations of words, must look un- 
sightly to those, who have been habituated 
to the shortened and pointed style, and 
breaks of thought, which have now heen 
for some years so anxiously studied 
among us : a practice I presume to have 
originated here in imitation of Monies- 
quieu's sententious manner ; itself an imi- 
tation of the oracular brevity of Tacitus, 
But if we have not, through the dread 
of the diffuse, started off into the oppo* 
site extreme so far, that the continuity of 
thought is frequently dissolved, it is well. 
Fallit te incautum pietas tua. — Might not 
Conyers Middleton, and Sir William Jones, 
who, it should seem, took Middleton for 
his model, be instanced as having fallen 
on a just medium as to flowing, large, and 
rounded periods ? 

Spratt is but florid and Ciceronian ; and 



79 

Cotvley's Prose, however sweet, wants 
force ; and Temple and Tittotson are of 
another school. On the whole, then, I 
have in my recollection no Prose Writer 
of his own time, who will appear to more 
advantage when placed against Milton, 
with all his scholastic imperfections, if we 
except HohbeSy who stands, I think, with- 
out a rival among his contemporaries, for 
a strong, clear, equable, and easy style : 
a style admirably calculated for philoso- 
phical disquisition, and which it is to be 
regretted that Locke, who is not without 
obligations to him in his metaphysical rea- 
soning, did not attain. Unless indeed 
Dryden could be brought into the same 
sera ; since Dryderts Prose, though not 
sufficiently free from foreign affectations, 
is without any question our standard of 
vigorous, natural, and authentic English. 
" Criticism, either didactic or defensive, 
ie occupies almost all his Prose, except 
" those pages which he has devoted to his 
iC Patrons ; but none of his Prefaces were 
" ever thought tedious. They have not 



80 

" the formality of a settled style, in which 
" the first half of the sentence hetrays the 
" other. The clauses are never balanced, 
" nor the periods modelled : every word 
" seems to drop by chance, though it falls 
" into its proper place *." Praise more 
just, or more happily conceived, will not 
easily be found. 

In conclusion : if the decision on the 
style of Milton's English Prose, in his 
works of a higher mood, were to be sub- 
mitted to those alone who do not admire 
the alluring but vitious Gallicism of Hume 
and Gibbon, and who are not smitten by 
the " gay rankness" of our " modern fus- 
" tianists," I should not feel myself at all 
solicitous lest the result should be adverse 
to the opinion I have now ventured to 
offer : so far, let me be understood, as it is 
duly appreciated in its relation to the time 
in which they appeared. They who think 
otherwise, before they object the names of 
Hooker, or Barrow, or Taylor, would 

* Johnson. 



81 

do well to try if they can select from the 
writings of these acknowleged masters of 
our language a finer succession of well- 
turned periods, at once perspicuous, mas- 
culine^ and rhythmical, than such as I 
now adduce from the introductory section 
to his second Book on the Meason of Church 
Government, 

f? Surely to every good and peaceable 
u Man, it must in nature needs he a hate- 
" ful thing to be the displeaser and mo- 
" lester of thousands ; much better would 
" it like him doubtless to be the Messenger 
" of Gladness and Contentment, which is 
" his chief intended business to all Man- 
€ - kind, but that they resist and oppose 
" their own true happiness. But when 
"God commands to take the trumpet, 
" and blow a dolorous or a jarring 
" blast, it lies not in Man's Will what 
" he shall say, or what he shall con- 
" ceal. If he shall think to be silent, as 
" Jeremiah did, because of the reproach 

and derision he met with daily, and all 

G 



a 



82 

' his familiar friends watched for his 
' halting, to be revenged on him for 
' speaking the Truth, he would be forced 
6 to confess as he confest ; his word was 
I in my heart as a burning fire shut up in 
6 my bones ; / was weary with forbearing , 
I and could not stay. Which might teach 
' these times not suddenly to condemn all 
' things that are sharply spoken, or vehe- 
6 mently written, as proceeding out of 
' Stomach, Virulence, and Ill-nature ; 
' but to consider rather that if the Pre- 
i lates have leave to say the worst that 
' can be said, or do the worst that can be 
c done, while they strive to keep to them- 
' selves, to their great pleasure and com- 
6 modity, those things which they ought 
' to render up, no Man can be justly 
' offended with him that shall endeavour 
i to impart and bestow, without any gain 
' to himself, those sharp but saving words, 
' which would be a terror and a torment 
6 in him to keep back. For me, I have 
' determined to lay up as the best trea- 



83 

" sure, and solace of a good old Age, if 
" God vouchsafe it me, the honest Liberty 
" of free Speech from my Youth, where I 
" shall think it available in so dear a 
" concernment as the Church's good. For 
" if I be either by disposition, or what 
" other cause, too inquisitive, or suspi- 
cious of myself and mine own doings, 
who can help it ? But this I foresee, 
that should the Church be brought 
" under heavy oppression, and God have 
" given me ability the while to reason 
" against that Man that should be the 
" Authour of so foul a deed ; or should 
" she, by blessing from above on the iii- 
" dustry and courage of faithful Men, 
" change this her distracted estate into 
" better days, without the least further- 
" ance or contribution of those few ta- 
%i lents which God at that present had 
" lent me, I foresee what stories I should 
" hear within myself, all my life after, of 
" discourage and reproach. Timorous 
" and ingrateful, the Church of God is 
now again at the foot of her insulting 



*< 



84 

a Enemies, and thou bewailest ; what 
" matters it for thee, or thy bewailing ? 
" When time was, thou couldest not find 
ff a syllable of all that thou hast read, or 
" studied, to utter in her behalf. Yet 
ff ease and leisure was given thee for thy 
*f retired Thoughts, out of the sweat of 
M other Men. Thou hatlst the diligence, 
fci the parts, the language of a Man, if a 
ff vain subject were to be adorned or 
S 6 beautified ; but when the cause of God 
Ci and his Church was to be pleaded, for 
" which purpose that tongue was given 
ff thee which thou hast, God listened if 
" he could hear thy voice among his zea- 
ff lous servants, but thou wert dumb as a 
ff beast ; from henceforward be that which 
" thine own brutish silence hath made 
" thee. Or else I should have heard on 
ff the other ear; Slothful and ever to be 
ff set light by, the Church hath now over- 
U come her late distresses after the un- 
" wearied labours of many her true ser- 
" vants that stood up in her defence ; thou 
" also wouldst take upon thee to share 



85 

" among them of their joy : But where- 
" fore thou ? Where canst thou show 
H any word or deed of thine which might 
" have hastened her peace ? Whatever 
<c thou dost now talk, or write, or look, 
" is the alms of other Men's active pru- 
" dence and zeal. Dare not now to say, 
" or do any thing better than thy former 
" sloth and infancy*; or if thou darest, 
" thou dost impudently to make a thrifty 
" purchase of boldness to thyself, out of 
ft the painful merits of other Men ; what 
*' before was thy Sin, is now thy Duty, to 
" be abject and worthless. These, and 
" such like lessons as these, I know would 
" have been my Matins duely, and my Even- 
" song. But now by this little diligence, 
" mark what a privilege I have gained 
" with good Men and Saints, to claim my 
" right of lamenting the tribulations of 

* infancy.] This is one of Milton's Latin senses : 
" Possitne eloquentia converti in infantiam" Cicero, 
Infant still bears this etymological meaning in West- 
minster Hall. 



86 

" the Church, if she should suffer, when 
" others that have ventured nothing for 
u her sake, have not the honour to be 
" admitted mourners. But if she lift up 
" her drooping head and prosper, among 
" those that have something more than 
" wished her welfare, I have my charter 
" and freehold of rejoicing to me and my 
¥ heirs. Concerning therefore this way- 
" ward subject against Prelaty, the touch- 
" ing whereof is so distastful and dis- 
" quietous to a number of Men, as by 
" what hath been said I may deserve of 
" charitable Readers to be credited, that 
" neither envy nor gall hath entered me 
ff upon this Controversy, but the enforce- 
" ment of Conscience only, and a pre- 
" ventive fear lest the omitting of this 
" Duty should be against me when I 
" would store up to myself the good pro- 
" vision of peaceful hours/' 

In this passage his Probity shines out. 
But I could wish this justificatory eluci- 
dation of his motives for mixing in the 



87 

polemical discussions of his day to be 
estimated for the merit of the Style : 
that we should here consider Milton as 
an Authour only; suspending, if it be 
possible, our reverence for a Man, to 
whose dignity of nature these exalted 
sentiments were congenial, and who made 
them the principles which actuated his 
conduct in trying conjunctures, through a 
life singularly chequered. 

Dec. 5, 18 17. 



THE END, 



CHARLES, WOOD, Printer, 
Poppin's Court, Fleet Street, London, 



Speedily will be Published, by R. Hunter, 

AREOPAGITICA; 

A 

gpettft 

OF 

JOHN MILTON, 

FOR THE 

LIBERTY OF UNLICENC'D PRINTING, 

TO 

THE PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND : 

With 

PREFATORY REMARKS, COPIOUS NOTES, PHILOLOGICAL AND EX- 
PLANATORY, AND EXCURSIVE ILLUSTRATIONS, 

BY 

T. HOLT WHITE, ESQ. 



" Milton's Areopagitiga is in all respects a Masterpiece/' 

Warbu-bton. 



B D '06 



